Pembroke gym owner set to participate in Death Race

Most people know when they can’t do one more pushup, or run one more mile. Eventually, they give in to fatigue.

This June, Rob Belley, 35 of Marshfield and Adam Klaucke, 37 of Duxbury are going to do their best to prove they never need to give in.

Mark Burridge mburridge@wickedlocal.com

Most people know when they can’t do one more pushup, or run one more mile. Eventually, they give in to fatigue.

This June, Rob Belley, 35 of Marshfield and Adam Klaucke, 37 of Duxbury are going to do their best to prove they never need to give in.

Belley and Klaucke are headed to Pittsfield, Vermont to a property nestled in the green mountains. It sounds scenic and relaxing but it won’t be. The two extremely fit men will be taking part in what’s known as a death race.

“You don’t know when it starts or finishes,” Klaucke said.

Organized by Peak Races of Pittsfield, which also runs Spartan race events, The Death Race was created by endurance athletes Joe De Sena and Andy Weinberg when they realized that the hardest endurance competitions weren’t difficult enough. The Death Race was designed to challenge an athlete to compete beyond what a person is normally capable of doing, in body and mind.

Belley and Peak Spokesman Doug Drotman both said the death race is viewed as the most difficult endurance run a person can do.

In an effort to simulate how life is unfair, death race organizers keep much of the race a mystery to participants -- including the start and finish time and its duration.

“There’s no dead set time for a start, we tell people to show up on Friday and not to book a trip home until Monday,” Drotman said.

Drotman said when the death race first began, contestants were told it would start at a certain time, but to show up the night before for specifics on what they would be doing. Then, the race would start immediately after the training event. Since then, they’ve kept the starting time more vague still so participants have to be ready at any moment.

When the actual race begins, anything could happen.

“They tell you that you need to know things that have nothing to do with the challenge,” Belley said. “The idea is that life isn’t fair, so they don’t make it fair.”

Belley has actually completed two previous death races. He traveled to Mexico where he completed in the first death race to take place outside Pittsfield, Vermont. He said along the way, he has picked up a few skills that didn’t end up coming in handy.

“In Mexico, they told us we should learn how to cut a chicken up to eat,” he said. “But when I got there, it had nothing to do with it.”

The goals for this year’s death race haven’t been released yet, but the challenges are never only physical, Belley said. At a previous death race Belley didn’t attend, contestants needed to solve a Rubick’s cube, he said. In another race that Belley competed in, he had to run up a mountain to find a puzzle piece. When he got down the mountain again, he had to put it on a table. Then he ran back up to retrieve the next piece of what was a 24-piece puzzle. And he was running up and down the mountain with laden with a backpack filled with 50 pounds of equipment and a 70-pound sandbag on his back.

“The last [death race] I did took 37 hours of work time,” he said.

Not surprisingly, only 10-15 percent of those who compete actually finish a death race. Drotman said in a typical death race about 300 people begin, but only 30 or 40 finish.

“It’s actually been increasing over the last few,” he said. “But, we’re starting to get the cream of the endurance runner crop.”

Part of the challenge for each runner is to get a media notice published that notes his or her participation in the event. If Belley and Klaucke weren’t able to get this article written, they would have started the death race with 2,500 burpees (also known as an up downs).

The story probably wouldn’t have been written until June if left up to laid-back Belley.

“I’m very go with the flow,” Belley said.

Klaucke, who works as the regional vice president of U.S. Tech Solutions, a global staffing company, approaches life differently.

“I barely ever flow into things,” he said. “I like to be structured.”

Klaucke started training with Belley because he wanted to get in better shape. Over the course of two years, he has lost 65 lbs and began not only participating in Spartan race events, but was ranked 29 out of 11,650 people who participate in the race series’ elite heats. Belley ranks at 65.

“It’s a given you will hallucinate,” he said. “I saw a crowd of people in dark hooded sweatshirts huddled together in the woods – they weren’t really there. And at one point I thought I was talking to one of the race organizers. But, it turned out to be a tree.”

It’s hard to imagine a more stressful scenario than how Belley’s death race experience began in Mexico. He and the other contestants were told to put on red clothes and run until they reached a cattle truck. Then, he was packed into the back of the vehicle with all the other runners and taken to some kind of arena.

When Belley was let out of the truck, organizers zip-tied everyone’s hands in front of their bodies corralled them into a stall, and hosed them down.

After being pushed through a few doors, Belley was told that contestants would find their bibs in the middle of the arena, turned inside out. On the opposite wall was a posting for all the runners’ race numbers. Belley and all the other contestants had been pushed into a bull ring with red clothes on, and had to recover their red bibs, while an angry bull ran after them.

“I got hit [by the bull] three times,” he said. “Luckily, all in my backpack. It was crazy.”

Drotman said although those taking part have had broken bones and other injuries, there has never been a fatality or a life-threatening injury.

Klaucke said after he started competing in endurance events, Belley kept suggesting more and more difficult competitions, and now that he has achieved so much in Spartan, he said he hopes he is ready for a death race.

“For me it’s something that has evolved,” he said.

Belley said he began participating in the events for the same reason De Sena and Weinberg created them in the first place: everything else wasn’t hard enough.

“At the event there are always people from the special forces, professional athletes and Olympians, and a lot of them can’t do it,” he said. “There are a lot of people that are like-minded.”

Belley and Klaucke will take part in the death race June 29. For more information on death races check out www.peak.com.